Announcer: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda,
Maryland, this is All About Grants

Megan: From the Office of Extramural Research at the
National Institutes of Health, I’m Megan Columbus and
welcome again to All About Grants. Today we’ll be talking about timing your
application submission. With me today I have Dr. Sherry Stuesse from the Center
of Scientific Review. Sherry was a faculty member who competed for NIH grants
for some 25 years before she moved to NIH’s Center of Scientific Review, first serving
as a scientific review officer and now as a referral officer. So she brings to
us a good mix of an understanding of academia and review and the intricacies of
receipt and referral, which is an important part of this. So one of the things
it will be important for any applicant to do is to look for a funding
opportunity announcement, and they can get that funding opportunity
announcement through the NIH Guide to
Grants and Contracts or from Grants.gov, which is that federal portal for
finding opportunities for grants across the federal government. When would you
suggest that somebody start looking for that funding opportunity announcement?

Sherry: I would say anywhere from two months to about six
months before they get ready to apply, because they need to know that there is
something out there, that there’s interest in the research that they’re doing,
and they need to know that there is some sort of an announcement, which is
appropriate. So it’s a good idea to call your program officer at the institute
that you think is most appropriate for your research and to talk to them about
what’s out there and what might fit with your research.

Megan: So Sherry, when would you suggest that applicants
should submit their application?

Sherry: When they’ve already picked a funding opportunity
announcement they have a due date, and the Division of Receipt and Referral
accepts applications starting about a month before the due date. If you submit
earlier than that, just any time you’re ready, that’s not advisable because the
funding opportunities change, NIH regulations change, and so we don’t hold
applications in some sort of box or barrel and then release them. You submit
within a month of the due date, but before the due date. The reason you submit
before the due date is so that you have a little bit of time to look at your
application and to reject it if you want to. You would have two days to reject
it and then resubmit it.

Megan: The other thing that’s important for investigators to
remember is the importance of coordinating with their office of sponsored
research or their business office at their institution. Because those internal
deadlines are often times before the application due date by as much has two
weeks. What happens if I miss my deadline that I’m targeting? Are there other
options for me?

Sherry: A given type of funding opportunity announcement may
have multiple due dates, like every four months if it’s a general funding opportunity
announcement, but if it is a special request, one-time request for funding,
what we call an RFA, there may just be one deadline and if you miss that
deadline that’s it for an RFA.

Megan: But if you miss the deadline for an RFA, which is a “request
for applications,” then you could go find a parent funding opportunity
announcement, which is one of those broad, NIH-wide, generally, announcements
and look to see if the institutes that you’re interested in receiving funding
from might be listed on those parent announcements.

Sherry: You can do that, but the name “parent announcement”
is somewhat of a misnomer for everything except the R01 applications because
for all the other, well I should say the R01 applications and the SBIR, the
small business applications, all the rest of the parent announcements have some
institutes that don’t take part in them.

Megan: Often times when you look at the funding opportunity
announcement it says “standard dates apply” and you’re taken to a table of due
dates and those show the application due dates for any given activity code or
type of NIH grant program. It also shows the review dates, the council dates,
and the first date you might expect an award. Could you just give kind of a
feeling for what that timeline is?

Sherry: The timeline is about 9 or 10 months for any given
application. Reviews generally occur about three or four months after the
application is submitted. It takes about a month to get the summary statements
all out. And then there’s a second level of review, which is done by the
councils at the institutes. The councils don’t all meet on the same dates, but
they generally meet, say, in May or in October or in January or February. And
you have to figure that this whole process probably takes nine or 10 months and
then there have to be the final decisions on funding, which occur at the
institute, which can take another month or two.

Megan: I know that one thing that people get a little
frustrated about is we don’t tell them immediately that they’re not getting
funded. They find if they get an award, but they don’t find out if they’re not
getting funded. And my understanding is that’s because they could be funded at
a future time over the next year. And so we don’t send out that notification.
What do you suggest that people do after they receive their summary statement?

Sherry: Well, eventually they do find out one way or the
other, but often institutes are a little bit conservative in their funding at
the beginning of the year because they’re not quite sure how much money they’re
going to have. So if you think you might be close to the payline, and you’ve
talked to your program officer and they’ve told you that’s possible, then you
just have to wait to see if it gets funded or not.

Megan: The payline being the line at which the institute
expects to have enough money to pay those grants.

Sherry: To pay those grants that are better than that line.

Megan: One of the questions that we frequently receive has
to do with whether the cycle in which applicants submit those applications have
an effect on whether they get funded or when they get funded. Can you speak to
that at all?

Sherry: I think there’s no advantage to submitting in one
particular cycle versus the other because at the end of the year a given
institute will have funded at a certain level. So they may be a little more
conservative at the beginning of the year especially if a budget hasn’t been
passed. But there is no advantage of one cycle versus the other overall.

Megan: Because those applications that might be on the cusp,
like right on the payline…

Sherry: They will be held for consideration later on in the
year.

Megan: Well, thank you for joining us today. This has been
helpful. For NIH and OER this is Megan Columbus.

Announcer: To search the NIH
Guide for Grants and Contracts click on the “Funding” tab of the OER
website at grants.nih.gov. And search for “standard submission dates” on the
OER website to view submission dates by cycle and type of grant program.